OTTAWA —Quebecor’s announcement last June that it planned to launch a conservative all-news channel was greeted with protests, petitions and pleas for regulators to deny it a licence.

When Sun News Network launches on Monday, we’ll get a better idea of whether it will be a bright light or, as its critics fear, a black mark on the Canadian media landscape.

As its motto states, the network plans to be a bastion of Hard News and Straight Talk, with the former on offer between 6 a.m. and 5 p.m., and the latter from supper hour onward.

Sun News was dubbed Fox News North by critics last June when media giant Quebecor, owner of the Sun chain of tabloid newspapers, as well as Videotron Ltd., the largest cable provider in Quebec, Canoe Inc. and various other outlets large and small across the country, announced it was throwing its hat into the 24-hour news ring as a competitor to CBC’s News Network and CTV’s News Channel.

The network’s launch in the middle of a federal election campaign may be coincidental — but it probably won’t be without impact.

“It’ll certainly make a lot of political waves because people’s political antennae are pretty raised because we’re in the middle of an election campaign,” says Antonia Maioni, director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. “I don’t think it’s going to actually raise the level of civilized debate.”

Worries about that lack of civilized debate were what had most critics crying foul long before the new station even got its licence last November.

The fact that the new network’s employee lineup included four former members of the prime minister’s staff, including former spokesman Kory Teneycke at the top of the news chain as vice-president of development; former Prime Minister’s Office issues officer Matt Wolf as producer; former PMOadvertising manager Dennis Matthews; and, as issues management researcher, Jason Plotz (who left before the launch) — not to mention the girlfriend of Stephen Harper’s executive assistant as weekend weather girl — fuelled the speculation that the new network would be a mouthpiece for the Conservative government.

Ezra Levant, described on the Sun News website as “best-selling author, lawyer, blogger and general trouble-maker,” will kick off the opinion portion of the network’s offerings each day with his current affairs program, The Source.

Levant, former publisher of the Western Standard and most recently author of Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands, says he hopes the effect of the channel’s launch will be to provide better reporting of the campaign.

“If the last couple of weeks are any indication, the media party has its own agenda,” Levant said. “What are the media party’s top issues:Census-gate. Oda-gate. In-and-out gate. Every drip and drop of Parliamentary insider trivia and it’s so self-indulgent.

“For a week there, the No. 1 issue in the election campaign was reporters complaining that reporters didn’t have more questions as reporters.”

The parliamentary press gallery has lost sight of the real issues and made itself irrelevant, Levant argues.

“My deep hope for the Sun News Network is that we are less self-indulgent and that we actually talk about things that matter — not our own Twitter apps, or our own iPads, or our own Facebook pages, or how many questions the prime minister did or didn’t answer. To at least talk about issues, like taxes or jobs or the American debt or what our foreign policy in Libya is.

“Can we not talk about substance and not process? That’s my hope.”

Teneycke came out swinging last June following Quebecor’s announcement, decrying the current “lazy and complacent” news media and seemingly stirring up of controversy over the new news channel.

He stepped down from his position last fall, saying his presence was a distraction as Sun News sought regulatory approval. But since his quiet return in January, he has let Luc Lavoie, a one-time spokesman for former prime minister Brian Mulroney, do the talking.

Lavoie said in an interview last November that the idea that the network will have any relation to the right-wing Fox News — home to pundits such as Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck — is “totally ridiculous.”

Speaking after the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission granted it a Category 2 licence, Lavoie said the new station will be “populist, blue-collar, irreverent and, if one wants to go that way, right-wing.”

So far, Sun News has announced that Calgary-based Shaw Communications will offer the channel to its customers in Western Canada and Ontario free for a six-month trial period. No deals with other major cable providers have so far been announced, though Sun TV is currently available to some Rogers subscribers.

Lavoie was not made available for comment ahead of Monday’s launch, and, with the exception of Levant, on-air personalities contacted for this article turned down requests for interviews.

But in an interview earlier this month with ProjetJ, the French edition of J-source.ca, the online magazine of The Canadian Journalism Project, Lavoie said the model for Sun News is Quebec’s “personality-driven” LCN — Le Canal Nouvelles (The News Channel).

Unlike LCN, which gets its news from the professional broadcast journalists of Quebecor-owned TVA — also part-owner of Sun News Network, along with Sun Media Corp. — the English network will be fed by print journalists who have been trained to collect videotape and prepare broadcast reports on top of their normal duties of tweeting, blogging, writing for the newspapers’ websites and writing articles for the print editions of the papers.

Broadcast standards require companies with both print and broadcast interests to have “diverse and distinct editorial and news-reporting voices” as well as “independence and separation of the management of news departments.”

The CRTC did not respond to requests for comment about Sun News.

The new network will have studios in Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg and Calgary. Quebecor is reportedly investing $100 million over the next five years in the venture. Its partner for international news is not Fox, but CNN.

David Taras, author of The Newsmakers: The Media’s Influence on Canadian Politics, and professor of media studies at the University of Calgary and Mount Royal University, says the question about cable news channels is whether what people are watching is actually “news.”

Commentary and opinion is less expensive to produce than news, and the 24-hour news cycle’s bottomless appetite for breaking news headlines to keep the viewers involved compounds the lack of substance.

“It gives people the illusion that they are on top of the news but they’re not getting the real news, they’re getting highly sensationalized jolts,” he says. “You’re not doing the deeper stories, you’re not doing the public policy issues. . . . Basically the wire comes up, you have to feed the show, and here’s the latest murder and ‘Wow! It’s fast-breaking news!’ ”

While worries that Sun News will import U.S.-style opinioneering have dominated the discussion about the new network, many are looking forward to seeing it.

Journalists, for example, welcome another news outlet, and are willing to wait and see. Others — Levant would say the majority of Canadians who don’t feel served by the current “mainstream consensus media” — welcome a different perspective.

Steve Faguy, in his blog Fagstein, writes that his fear isn’t so much that the new channel will be conservative, but that it will be “cheap,” a “convergent utopia” with pretty faces in the anchors’ chairs and Sun Media print reporters providing the content.

Without broadcast journalists, he says, he doesn’t expect Sun News to provide news of the same calibre as the other networks.

Levant says that the uproar about the new channel “shows a brittleness in the Canadian opinion establishment.

“But it also shows a little bit of self-awareness that they don’t actually represent Canadian opinion as monolithically as they think they do.”

He points out that despite their mandatory carriage, CNN often has better ratings north of the border than Canada’s two current news channels.

“I disagree with the premise that Sun News Network will bring a low, bullying tone to Canadian news opinion,” says Levant, adding that his criticism of the news media in Canada isn’t that it’s liberal, but that it moves in “lockstep” on certain issues and fails to give voice to dissenting opinions.

Left or right, however, what it will come down to is bums in seats, says Taras.

“I think you have to come back to the fact that if people don’t see it as fair, if people see it as somehow hokey or extremely biased, if people don’t see it as credible, their readership or their viewership is going to fall like a stone,” Taras says. “And that will be the test.”